You don't know a language, you live it. You don't learn a language, you get used to it.

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Mental Tools

The day you stop sucking at the language isn’t the end of the journey, it’s the beginning. Universities pay full, luscious lip service to this. Graduation is called “commencement”, at least in North America. But lip service it is. Full lusciousness notwithstanding. It’s said that most peoples learning — in fact, all nonfunctional reading —…

You are not a screw-up. You are not lazy. You work hard. Too hard. At things that don’t matter. You work hard at struggling and self-blame and self-hate. You work hard at worrying. You work hard at pacing the floor. You work hard at imagining terrifying, low-probability contingencies. You work hard on trying to force…

…You already know the language. It already belongs to you. You’re just maintaining your knowledge. You’re not struggling and there is no “there” to get to. You’re not a foreigner; you’re just a remedial native speaker who was functionally deaf (not enough hearing hours) and is now getting speech therapy.

“Mallory is famously quoted as having replied to the question “Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?” with the retort “Because it’s there”” [George Mallory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia] Growing up, I had the privilege of interacting with people from a wide range of social classes on a daily basis. I didn’t think…

There is no doubt about it. Living to amuse yourself is lonely and pathetic. But so is living to impress the Joneses. That lifestyle leaves you feeling plenty empty inside; it’s always psychologically impoverishing and often monetarily so as well. One either dies trying to fill one’s life with the accoutrements of Jonesiness (BTW, I…

Maybe this one should be called “why life is so good to you, but you don’t realize it”. Anyway. Starting dirty is amazing. Remember how video games were back in the 1970s, 1980s and even the first part of the 1990s? No? Well, let me jog your memory: you couldn’t save! YA COULDN’T SAVE! You…